I wouldn't count disk based (film) distribution out just yet. Perhaps Blu-Ray and HD-DVD didn't stick but I think it's entirely possible a new format will in the future. There are a wide range of factors that could lead to this not least the technological ones. First of the infrastructure to stream good HD content (e.g. it's not been compressed to the point where you might was well watch it on You Tube) isn't even nearly there in a lot of places and won't be for a good while yet. It might be in a few major cities and all of South Korea but it's not widespread. That puts "streamed" HD into the download now and watch later category which requires planning on the viewers part. Sure it's not a lot of planning but it's more than just gabbing a disk off the shelf so it's a barrier to adoption. Then there's the affective qualities of the disk: a lot of people like owning something tangible. That's really hard to replicate in the digital world especially when it gets pumped so full of DRM it leaves people unsure if they actually bought the movie or not.
I struggle to believe these numbers. Perhaps your average USian has a huge amount more money to burn than your average UKian (the lump of dirt I call home) but even then I struggle to believe that around 15% of people own a HD player of some kind (assuming some own both formats). I'm a moderate home theatre buff (1000+ DVDs, projector, etc) and I don't own a HD player of any kind. I know a fair number of people that are also cinema buffs to varying degrees and they don't own HD players either (one has a PS3 but no Blu-Ray film disks so doesn't count). I'm guessing that uptake of film based HD content is very low and those HD player numbers are almost certainly from games consoles which probably aren't being used for films.
As for purchasing Blu-Ray films in a 1:6 ratio with DVD's, come on, have you ever bought a Blu-Ray movie? Have you even seen anyone buying one? I don't even remember seeing people looking at the Blu-Ray stand in my local DVD purchasing establishments. I do however see people heading to the checkouts with armfuls of cheap DVDs on a regular basis.
Couldn't agree with you more. I watched my Gran die of lung cancer which was no doubt caused by years of smoking. I'm sure it will be the most horrific thing that I have ever seen. The most shocking thing was the lumps that formed on all the lymph nodes they are a picture I can't get out of my head. You would, I agree, have to be totally insane to regularly do something that is known to have a high risk of giving you cancer.
They will get 690,000 pages tagged investigate this. Given an open and apparently unchecked money source the MP's will have pushed every last thting they can through the system. I've heard a few people on the news saying that we should think ourselves lucky because corruption in other (developing) nations is so much worse. That has got to be one of the most idiotic arguments I've ever heard. I'm not about to advocate stringing them up but there are at least a few cases that should be investigated by the police and numerous others that should result in sackings. I suspect though that the police will never become involved and so far I don't think anyone has been sacked (quite a few have jumped before being pushed).
I don't think anyone expected their MP to be whiter than white. People would have turned a blind eye to claims for a few extra miles traveled and a bit of food and maybe even some modest second home improvement / repair but some of these MPs have been claiming for houses they didn't even own! IMHO the worst revelation is that it would appear that they even changed the law so that their scond homes were exempt from capital gains tax a luxury that, AFAIK, nobody else can say they have and in a booming house market a loophole that has netted many MPs sizable amounts of money.
Fair minded policies are all well and good but where do you draw the line? The problem here is the same as with all infrastructure projects: you get diminishing returns and increasing costs as you appraoch 100% coverage. I would guess that given time BT or some other company would get fiber / cable / other decent pipe to between 60 and 70% of the population. I conclude this because we have a cable network that covers almost all large towns and cites now.
If we pay 10p tax on an internet connection high speed coverage probably rises to 85%, at 20p tax 95%. The last 4.5% account for the next 30p and the final 0.5% are't even reachable with the amount of money the Government will throw at the problem. Personally, I would rather pay just 20p and tell the other 5% to make other arrangements (I live in a town that would get a fast connection without any tax BTW).
I hope that I'm not the only one that is fed up with this modern approach to trying to preserve everything we ever do. Why can't we be happy with the knowledge that we did it? If I got a chance to see the first boot print on the moon I'd jump at it but would my life be any worse if that boot print accidentally got driven over, hardly. I'm not advocating that we should go out of our way to erase history just let it take care of itself.
I'd bet that 99.999% of the population probably didn't even realize that there was a first boot print still up there and now they will get all up in arms because it might at some point in the future get erased. Sigh. Give me a solution to world hunger, fusion power and a decent internet connection first and then I'll care.
Thank you I now see the error in my thinking which I was fair certain must be there since it results in an absurd situation when taken to the limit. It's an interesting reason ing puzzle though.
You seem to know a bit about submarines so perhaps you could answer a question that has puzzled me. If you build a submarine like an onion with a hull inside a hull and put pressurized water / air between the two hulls to half the outside pressure would each hull then only need to be strong enough to resist half the external pressure?
I can't see the flaw but it feels wrong because it seems to imply that it would be at least theoretically possible to build a submarine out of sheets of tin-foil as long as there were enough layers and the pressure could be maintained accurately enough.
Or better than that why not go for a super conducting grid? Seems to me that the majority of the technology is now available at a fairly reasonable price and the liquid nitrogen casing could act as an energy store in itself for wind power.
I initially read that as "convert U-238 to US dollars". I'm pretty sure trying that would result in something but I agree it probably wouldn't be anything helpful.
I can't comment about a 100 year old hammer but the house I'm currently doing up is about 200 years old and after a year of exploring and fixing every square centimetre I can say without a doubt I would take modern material and construction techniques over old ones any day.
I'm not so sure that the apparent over engineering was because of a lack of understanding of the strength of the materials as it was a lack of reliable material properties. The vast majority of the wood in our house has obviously been used somewhere else first (probably in ships) and it's got cracks and chunks missing all over the place. There are also big lumps of tree with huge knots etc etc. Modern constructional timber isn't defect free but it has to meet strict quality controls so you can calculate it's strength.
Even the bricks used in our house aren't properly square so they don't stack terribly well and the mortar is lime based so not as strong as cement and more variable during application. Considering the materials they had to work with I think they did a very good job.
I agree that something as complex as an office suite needs some sort of API which third parties can use to interact with it but making core features extensions doesn't, to me, feel like the correct way forward.
Anyway, having stuck the boot into one idea I'd like to say that the way KWord handles images in documents is fantastic - why can't all word processors work this way? Or more to the point why, when I insert an image into an MS Word document (and OOo) does it immediately think that I want to obscure a load of text with a floating image? I wouldn't have written it if I wanted it hidden.
What's with this obsession people seem to have with extensions all of a suddenly. I don't want to manage a pile of extensions all the time I want all the core functionality built in. I don't care too much about bloat, memory is dirt cheap and even the lowest spec (desktop) machine I would ever use now is more than a match for a full on office suite. I can't help feeling this is yet another situation where choice and configurability is being touted as a good thing when actually it's a problem because there is simply too much of it.
IMHO the worst feature of Firefox is extensions. It's great that you can tailor it to your own needs but the constant updates (colourful tabs I'm looking at you) drive me round the bend and a fresh install on a machine means half an hour finding and downloading all those extensions again. Perhaps it would be more acceptable if there was a way of just indicating that updates should be automatically installed and providing a simple list of extensions to install on first execution.
The other problem I find with extensions is the way they break package managers. Hopefully as KOffice is a core package there will be some common sense applied. If you look at the Eclipse packages some extensions are packaged but most aren't pretty much defeating the whole point of using the distro package repository (and they are horribly out of date).
I wonder if this would actually be useful before we develop FTL travel. Presumably it's a comparatively simple receiver and some very clever software in which case deep space probes could use it to check their position. I would suggest that they use more than four pulsars though to improve accuracy.
In answer to question number 3 I would guess that there are quite a few more vulnerabilities to be found in the standard library but with the near non-existence of applets in the wild very few black hatters will be looking for them I suspect.
There is a possible problem with web start applications (of which there are a few) but it would probably be easier to just use peoples ignorance of security to get them to grant your application all permissions. Much as I would like to see it differently JavaFX isn't going to be a problem either.
To be fair to Java I think it's security track record is pretty amazing. There have been a few problems but this is the first major one that I can think of that doesn't involve native code.
There is only one good thing about this database: it's another cost for the Government to bare and it will require more staff to maintain it. As a UK tax payer you might think I'm mad for saying that but hear me out.
We have a rot in our country that is causing the state to grow almost totally unchecked. The people are broadly split into two camps: those working every hour FSM sends and those sponging of the state. The workers don't have time to try to change the system the spongers don't want to. The only way it's going to get better is for it to collapse under it's own weight and get rebuilt hopefully better (but probably with the same flaws).
Perhaps it seems a little defeatist of me to say this but think about it for a moment. When was the last time the people paying the tax really got a say in anything? I don't have the figures but I would bet that the largest group of non-voters are working people. Not only are they becoming a minority (government workers don't count) they are suffering exclusion problems too.
I'm not expert but I've done the same as you with a busted hard drive. The thing is that the recovery people don't really know what they are looking for so it's hard to tell them what special recovery code to write in order to recover your data. As far as I can tell data recovery firms are good if the drive motor fails or the circuit board goes bad because they have clean rooms where they can open the drive and image it. If the drive goes bad logically they you are stuffed.
If they implement it like flash block so that the ad is replaced with a button to click to show the ad then I might consider turning the option on. If it pops up a dialog every time it blocks an ad then it goes in the bin!
Oh yeah, it will only show this pop up requesting the ad be displayed when there is a special meta-tag. I wonder how many seconds it will take for every ad service to include that tag.
I could think of nothing better than watching the Murdoch empire come to a grinding halt and then slowly fall off a cliff (and then burst into flames just as the camera pans away). As you can probably gather I can't stand the man but I think he is probably correct. Just look at free news papers, there is one thing that is the same across all of them: the news it them is rubbish. There are some like the Metro (for my US'en and other friends the Metro is given away at train stations in the morning) which are ok but they have a seriously captured audience and the quality has dropped as other free papers have started to compete in the same space.
I think the next 30 years will see the end of most news papers. News is already covered well by TV based news companies that have already colonized the web. What space is left for the papers?
My somewhat linux focused site (the linux material makes up about 20%) gets about 100k unique visitors a month the figures break down as:
Windows 80%
Linux 10%
Mac 8%
Unknown 0.6%
Also rans...
I'm under no illusion that this linux figure is a true representation of its adoption but the percentage of linux users has risen over time. I also suspect that about half that unknown figure is actually some flavour of linux that isn't being detected correctly. If I had to guess I would say linux is on about 2.5% of desktops.
If I were you I'd have a little read up on thermodynamics. Splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen will always take, at a minimum, the same amount of energy as you get from combining them. In reality the if you get 20% of the energy back when you recombine them you are doing well. However, and here's the interesting bit, fuel cells themselves are very efficient so over all the transfer of energy from the source to the point of use can be acceptible.
A few years of turmoil may be a good thing as it would hopefully teach the people the value of good leadership over what most "democracies" currently have which is wishy-washy in-it-for-themselves brain-dead corrupt morons running the place.
What I think we really need is the next generation of rule beyond democracy. I don't know exactly what form it would take but just like democracy brought about a separation of the legislature and the judiciary we should probably now work towards a separation of the needs of the people and the needs of the state. perhaps into two separate governments.
Think about it for a moment: the wants of business and the wants of the people are often at odds with each other. At the moment business almost always wins because it has the money so the people get trampled. The peoples-government could be run on a set of guiding principals based on freedom and responsibility and would make laws that affect the person. The businesses-government would have the task of making the country rich through trade and commerce, it would make laws that affect how businesses work.
Perhaps the idea won't fly but it certainly makes for an interesting idea I think.
I think there is certainly some mileage in what you are saying but I think you missed one vital point regarding consumers in poorer nations at least: they don't have spare cash. For the most part almost all their money goes on buying essential goods, they don't have spare cash to buy the next gadget. From the advertisers point of view there is little point in directing adverts at them even if they were localized.
Of course this is a rather broad brush argument because there are rich people even in the poorest countries but I think the marketing people probably feel there aren't enough of them.
I care because today he's doing it using his money, tomorrow he (or someone else) will be asking for government money to help preserve this or something else - then it costs me money.
There is a growing habit of navel gazing which, I feel, we need to combat. I'm not advocating deliberately destroying history or forgetting the lessons of the past but we should be focusing our attention on what we can achieve in the future.
I don't see the dilemma here, we are talking about companies that are in the business of trying to make money. If it is prohibitively expensive / unprofitable for them to supply video to Africa they should stop doing it. Of course there might be a good business reason to do something that incurs a loss for a while but I don't think anyone would bank on Africa suddenly becoming a profitable area of the world for anyone but diamond miners.
I don't want to argue for rampant capitalism but we need to get a grip and realize that services cost money to provide and unless the consumers are willing to pay (in one way or another) they will probably have to go without.
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I wouldn't count disk based (film) distribution out just yet. Perhaps Blu-Ray and HD-DVD didn't stick but I think it's entirely possible a new format will in the future. There are a wide range of factors that could lead to this not least the technological ones. First of the infrastructure to stream good HD content (e.g. it's not been compressed to the point where you might was well watch it on You Tube) isn't even nearly there in a lot of places and won't be for a good while yet. It might be in a few major cities and all of South Korea but it's not widespread. That puts "streamed" HD into the download now and watch later category which requires planning on the viewers part. Sure it's not a lot of planning but it's more than just gabbing a disk off the shelf so it's a barrier to adoption. Then there's the affective qualities of the disk: a lot of people like owning something tangible. That's really hard to replicate in the digital world especially when it gets pumped so full of DRM it leaves people unsure if they actually bought the movie or not.
I struggle to believe these numbers. Perhaps your average USian has a huge amount more money to burn than your average UKian (the lump of dirt I call home) but even then I struggle to believe that around 15% of people own a HD player of some kind (assuming some own both formats). I'm a moderate home theatre buff (1000+ DVDs, projector, etc) and I don't own a HD player of any kind. I know a fair number of people that are also cinema buffs to varying degrees and they don't own HD players either (one has a PS3 but no Blu-Ray film disks so doesn't count). I'm guessing that uptake of film based HD content is very low and those HD player numbers are almost certainly from games consoles which probably aren't being used for films.
As for purchasing Blu-Ray films in a 1:6 ratio with DVD's, come on, have you ever bought a Blu-Ray movie? Have you even seen anyone buying one? I don't even remember seeing people looking at the Blu-Ray stand in my local DVD purchasing establishments. I do however see people heading to the checkouts with armfuls of cheap DVDs on a regular basis.
Couldn't agree with you more. I watched my Gran die of lung cancer which was no doubt caused by years of smoking. I'm sure it will be the most horrific thing that I have ever seen. The most shocking thing was the lumps that formed on all the lymph nodes they are a picture I can't get out of my head. You would, I agree, have to be totally insane to regularly do something that is known to have a high risk of giving you cancer.
They will get 690,000 pages tagged investigate this. Given an open and apparently unchecked money source the MP's will have pushed every last thting they can through the system. I've heard a few people on the news saying that we should think ourselves lucky because corruption in other (developing) nations is so much worse. That has got to be one of the most idiotic arguments I've ever heard. I'm not about to advocate stringing them up but there are at least a few cases that should be investigated by the police and numerous others that should result in sackings. I suspect though that the police will never become involved and so far I don't think anyone has been sacked (quite a few have jumped before being pushed).
I don't think anyone expected their MP to be whiter than white. People would have turned a blind eye to claims for a few extra miles traveled and a bit of food and maybe even some modest second home improvement / repair but some of these MPs have been claiming for houses they didn't even own! IMHO the worst revelation is that it would appear that they even changed the law so that their scond homes were exempt from capital gains tax a luxury that, AFAIK, nobody else can say they have and in a booming house market a loophole that has netted many MPs sizable amounts of money.
Fair minded policies are all well and good but where do you draw the line? The problem here is the same as with all infrastructure projects: you get diminishing returns and increasing costs as you appraoch 100% coverage. I would guess that given time BT or some other company would get fiber / cable / other decent pipe to between 60 and 70% of the population. I conclude this because we have a cable network that covers almost all large towns and cites now.
If we pay 10p tax on an internet connection high speed coverage probably rises to 85%, at 20p tax 95%. The last 4.5% account for the next 30p and the final 0.5% are't even reachable with the amount of money the Government will throw at the problem. Personally, I would rather pay just 20p and tell the other 5% to make other arrangements (I live in a town that would get a fast connection without any tax BTW).
I hope that I'm not the only one that is fed up with this modern approach to trying to preserve everything we ever do. Why can't we be happy with the knowledge that we did it? If I got a chance to see the first boot print on the moon I'd jump at it but would my life be any worse if that boot print accidentally got driven over, hardly. I'm not advocating that we should go out of our way to erase history just let it take care of itself.
I'd bet that 99.999% of the population probably didn't even realize that there was a first boot print still up there and now they will get all up in arms because it might at some point in the future get erased. Sigh. Give me a solution to world hunger, fusion power and a decent internet connection first and then I'll care.
Thank you I now see the error in my thinking which I was fair certain must be there since it results in an absurd situation when taken to the limit. It's an interesting reason ing puzzle though.
You seem to know a bit about submarines so perhaps you could answer a question that has puzzled me. If you build a submarine like an onion with a hull inside a hull and put pressurized water / air between the two hulls to half the outside pressure would each hull then only need to be strong enough to resist half the external pressure?
I can't see the flaw but it feels wrong because it seems to imply that it would be at least theoretically possible to build a submarine out of sheets of tin-foil as long as there were enough layers and the pressure could be maintained accurately enough.
Or better than that why not go for a super conducting grid? Seems to me that the majority of the technology is now available at a fairly reasonable price and the liquid nitrogen casing could act as an energy store in itself for wind power.
I initially read that as "convert U-238 to US dollars". I'm pretty sure trying that would result in something but I agree it probably wouldn't be anything helpful.
I can't comment about a 100 year old hammer but the house I'm currently doing up is about 200 years old and after a year of exploring and fixing every square centimetre I can say without a doubt I would take modern material and construction techniques over old ones any day.
I'm not so sure that the apparent over engineering was because of a lack of understanding of the strength of the materials as it was a lack of reliable material properties. The vast majority of the wood in our house has obviously been used somewhere else first (probably in ships) and it's got cracks and chunks missing all over the place. There are also big lumps of tree with huge knots etc etc. Modern constructional timber isn't defect free but it has to meet strict quality controls so you can calculate it's strength.
Even the bricks used in our house aren't properly square so they don't stack terribly well and the mortar is lime based so not as strong as cement and more variable during application. Considering the materials they had to work with I think they did a very good job.
I agree that something as complex as an office suite needs some sort of API which third parties can use to interact with it but making core features extensions doesn't, to me, feel like the correct way forward.
Anyway, having stuck the boot into one idea I'd like to say that the way KWord handles images in documents is fantastic - why can't all word processors work this way? Or more to the point why, when I insert an image into an MS Word document (and OOo) does it immediately think that I want to obscure a load of text with a floating image? I wouldn't have written it if I wanted it hidden.
What's with this obsession people seem to have with extensions all of a suddenly. I don't want to manage a pile of extensions all the time I want all the core functionality built in. I don't care too much about bloat, memory is dirt cheap and even the lowest spec (desktop) machine I would ever use now is more than a match for a full on office suite. I can't help feeling this is yet another situation where choice and configurability is being touted as a good thing when actually it's a problem because there is simply too much of it.
IMHO the worst feature of Firefox is extensions. It's great that you can tailor it to your own needs but the constant updates (colourful tabs I'm looking at you) drive me round the bend and a fresh install on a machine means half an hour finding and downloading all those extensions again. Perhaps it would be more acceptable if there was a way of just indicating that updates should be automatically installed and providing a simple list of extensions to install on first execution.
The other problem I find with extensions is the way they break package managers. Hopefully as KOffice is a core package there will be some common sense applied. If you look at the Eclipse packages some extensions are packaged but most aren't pretty much defeating the whole point of using the distro package repository (and they are horribly out of date).
I wonder if this would actually be useful before we develop FTL travel. Presumably it's a comparatively simple receiver and some very clever software in which case deep space probes could use it to check their position. I would suggest that they use more than four pulsars though to improve accuracy.
In answer to question number 3 I would guess that there are quite a few more vulnerabilities to be found in the standard library but with the near non-existence of applets in the wild very few black hatters will be looking for them I suspect.
There is a possible problem with web start applications (of which there are a few) but it would probably be easier to just use peoples ignorance of security to get them to grant your application all permissions. Much as I would like to see it differently JavaFX isn't going to be a problem either.
To be fair to Java I think it's security track record is pretty amazing. There have been a few problems but this is the first major one that I can think of that doesn't involve native code.
There is only one good thing about this database: it's another cost for the Government to bare and it will require more staff to maintain it. As a UK tax payer you might think I'm mad for saying that but hear me out.
We have a rot in our country that is causing the state to grow almost totally unchecked. The people are broadly split into two camps: those working every hour FSM sends and those sponging of the state. The workers don't have time to try to change the system the spongers don't want to. The only way it's going to get better is for it to collapse under it's own weight and get rebuilt hopefully better (but probably with the same flaws).
Perhaps it seems a little defeatist of me to say this but think about it for a moment. When was the last time the people paying the tax really got a say in anything? I don't have the figures but I would bet that the largest group of non-voters are working people. Not only are they becoming a minority (government workers don't count) they are suffering exclusion problems too.
I'm not expert but I've done the same as you with a busted hard drive. The thing is that the recovery people don't really know what they are looking for so it's hard to tell them what special recovery code to write in order to recover your data. As far as I can tell data recovery firms are good if the drive motor fails or the circuit board goes bad because they have clean rooms where they can open the drive and image it. If the drive goes bad logically they you are stuffed.
If they implement it like flash block so that the ad is replaced with a button to click to show the ad then I might consider turning the option on. If it pops up a dialog every time it blocks an ad then it goes in the bin!
Oh yeah, it will only show this pop up requesting the ad be displayed when there is a special meta-tag. I wonder how many seconds it will take for every ad service to include that tag.
FAIL!
I could think of nothing better than watching the Murdoch empire come to a grinding halt and then slowly fall off a cliff (and then burst into flames just as the camera pans away). As you can probably gather I can't stand the man but I think he is probably correct. Just look at free news papers, there is one thing that is the same across all of them: the news it them is rubbish. There are some like the Metro (for my US'en and other friends the Metro is given away at train stations in the morning) which are ok but they have a seriously captured audience and the quality has dropped as other free papers have started to compete in the same space.
I think the next 30 years will see the end of most news papers. News is already covered well by TV based news companies that have already colonized the web. What space is left for the papers?
My somewhat linux focused site (the linux material makes up about 20%) gets about 100k unique visitors a month the figures break down as:
I'm under no illusion that this linux figure is a true representation of its adoption but the percentage of linux users has risen over time. I also suspect that about half that unknown figure is actually some flavour of linux that isn't being detected correctly. If I had to guess I would say linux is on about 2.5% of desktops.
If I were you I'd have a little read up on thermodynamics. Splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen will always take, at a minimum, the same amount of energy as you get from combining them. In reality the if you get 20% of the energy back when you recombine them you are doing well. However, and here's the interesting bit, fuel cells themselves are very efficient so over all the transfer of energy from the source to the point of use can be acceptible.
A few years of turmoil may be a good thing as it would hopefully teach the people the value of good leadership over what most "democracies" currently have which is wishy-washy in-it-for-themselves brain-dead corrupt morons running the place.
What I think we really need is the next generation of rule beyond democracy. I don't know exactly what form it would take but just like democracy brought about a separation of the legislature and the judiciary we should probably now work towards a separation of the needs of the people and the needs of the state. perhaps into two separate governments.
Think about it for a moment: the wants of business and the wants of the people are often at odds with each other. At the moment business almost always wins because it has the money so the people get trampled. The peoples-government could be run on a set of guiding principals based on freedom and responsibility and would make laws that affect the person. The businesses-government would have the task of making the country rich through trade and commerce, it would make laws that affect how businesses work.
Perhaps the idea won't fly but it certainly makes for an interesting idea I think.
I think there is certainly some mileage in what you are saying but I think you missed one vital point regarding consumers in poorer nations at least: they don't have spare cash. For the most part almost all their money goes on buying essential goods, they don't have spare cash to buy the next gadget. From the advertisers point of view there is little point in directing adverts at them even if they were localized.
Of course this is a rather broad brush argument because there are rich people even in the poorest countries but I think the marketing people probably feel there aren't enough of them.
I care because today he's doing it using his money, tomorrow he (or someone else) will be asking for government money to help preserve this or something else - then it costs me money.
There is a growing habit of navel gazing which, I feel, we need to combat. I'm not advocating deliberately destroying history or forgetting the lessons of the past but we should be focusing our attention on what we can achieve in the future.
I don't see the dilemma here, we are talking about companies that are in the business of trying to make money. If it is prohibitively expensive / unprofitable for them to supply video to Africa they should stop doing it. Of course there might be a good business reason to do something that incurs a loss for a while but I don't think anyone would bank on Africa suddenly becoming a profitable area of the world for anyone but diamond miners.
I don't want to argue for rampant capitalism but we need to get a grip and realize that services cost money to provide and unless the consumers are willing to pay (in one way or another) they will probably have to go without.